CHAUCER a nd R E L I G I O U S CONTROVERSIES in the M E D I E V A L and E A R L Y MODERN ERAS
N A N C Y B R A D L E Y WA R R E N
University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana
University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana 46556 undpress.nd.edu Copyright © 2019 by the University of Notre Dame All Rights Reserved Published in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
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CONTENTS
List of Illustrations ix Acknowledgments xi Introduction 1 chapter 1 Female Spirituality and Religious Controversy in The Canterbury Tales 000 chapter 2 Chaucer, the Chaucerian Tradition, and Female Monastic Readers 000 chapter 3 Competing Chaucers: The Development of Religious Traditions of Reception 000 chapter 4 “Let Chaucer Also Look to Himself”: Gender, Religion, and the Politics of Canon Formation in Seventeenth-Century England 000 chapter 5 “Flying from the Depravities of Europe, to the American Strand”: Chaucer and the Chaucerian Tradition in Early America 000 Notes 000 Index 000
Introduction The bawdy Wife of Bath might seem an unusual figure with whom to begin a book about Chaucer and Chaucer reception that considers such subjects as Chaucer’s female monastic pilgrims, English nuns’ interest in works by Chaucer and in the Chaucerian tradition, the early modern creation of Chaucer as an orthodox Catholic poet, and Chaucer’s significance for colonial American Puritan writers.1 However, both within the environment of The Canterbury Tales and in the context of Chaucer reception, Alison of Bath plays a significant role in linking Chaucer to the sorts of religious controversy that are the central concerns of this project. Only ten lines into her Prologue, the Wife of Bath begins to stir up religious controversy with her first mention of scripture. She says that “Crist ne wente nevere but onis / To weddyng, in the Cane of Galilee,” referring to someone (a cleric?) who cited this biblical story to her as an instructive “ensample” to illustrate to her that she “ne shollde wedded be but ones.”2 She then proceeds to rebut this claim with liberal recourse of her own to scripture. Taking a contrarian stance, she says: Men may deyne and glosen, up and doun But wel I woot, expres, withoute lye, God bad us for to wexe and multiplye; That gentil text kan I wel understonde. Eek wel I wot, he seyde myn housbonde 1
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Chaucer and Religious Controversies in the Medieval and Early Modern Eras
Shoulde lete fader and moder and take to me. But of no nombre mencion made he. (III 26–32) Signaling just how controversial a figure the Wife is, the Pardoner reacts strongly to her masterful manipulation of Holy Writ to craft her unorthodox—but orthodoxly supported through use of scripture— arguments for the legitimacy of multiple marriages and against the church’s idealization of virginity. He interrupts her to call her “a noble prechour” (III 165), thus raising the specter of one of the most problematic of later medieval religious figures: the female preacher of the Lollard movement, the major English religious controversy of Chaucer’s period.3 With her gleeful embrace of sexual pleasure and her endorsement of female mastery and sovereignty in marriage, the Wife of Bath calls to mind much else that is religiously suspect, if not downright unorthodox, in the later Middle Ages. Her views on these subjects, along with her troubling performance as a female preacher, highlight, furthermore, the degree to which gender is a central feature in religious controversies in the medieval and early modern periods. In spite of its transgressive aspects, the Wife of Bath’s Tale, which often circulated separately from her Prologue, was in the early modern period one of the most popular texts in the Chaucer canon, and its popularity stemmed largely from its status as a source of providential wisdom. Alison Wiggins notes that among early modern printed copies of Chaucer, the Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale, along with the Tale of Melibee, were often the most heavily marked up by readers.4 The old hag’s wedding night speech to the rapist knight, instructing him on the virtues of age and poverty as well as on the nature of true gentility, was often excerpted from the Wife of Bath’s Tale and quoted in commonplace books and other early modern texts (including, as I discuss in the final chapter of this book, Cotton Mather’s Magnalia Christi Americana)—further evidence for the tale’s popular reception as a font of sentential material of a highly orthodox and conventional kind. The Wife of Bath, then, embodies both the orthodox and the unorthodox as two sides of a coin, inseparably joined. The variations in her
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medieval and early modern receptions—as heretical female preacher, as bawd, as voice of received wisdom—make clear the porous boundary between the categories of orthodoxy and heterodoxy. Some of the very opinions and practices that make her suspect to a figure like the Pardoner are the foundations of her authoritative status as a source of wise advice for early modern readers. The union of the orthodox and the unorthodox in the figure of the Wife of Bath represents in microcosm the complex ambiguity of the figure of Chaucer and of the Chaucerian tradition in environments of religious controversy from his own time through the early modern era. From Chaucer’s lifetime through the beginning of the Enlightenment, the processes of defining Englishness (including determining the cultural value of writing in the English vernacular), of constituting an English nation, are inextricably bound up with the processes of defining religious orthodoxy and establishing gendered hierarchies. We see this dynamic in the Lancastrian monarchs’ implacable opposition to the Lollard movement, with its support for vernacular translations of religious texts and for women’s religious leadership. It is visible in the upheavals of Henry VIII’s break with Rome as well as in Mary Tudor’s accession to the throne and return to Rome. The nexus of gender, religion, and English identity informs the complexities of the Elizabethan Settlement and the worries about succession that troubled Elizabeth’s, and succeeding, reigns (Would the next monarch be Catholic or Protestant? Male or female?). As I consider in chapter 1, Chaucer himself traverses the porous boundaries between orthodoxy and heterodoxy and navigates the fraught interplay of gender and authority in the prologues and tales of his female monastic pilgrims. He explores the status of the English vernacular and the roles of women in religious cultures in an environment shaped by the advent of the Lollard movement and the emergence of innovative forms of female spirituality on the Continent. As the ideas of an English nation, English literature, and an English church develop over the course of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, Chaucer proves to be a touchstone as others define the orthodox and the heterodox while negotiating the categories of masculine and feminine in religiopolitical conflicts from the “King’s
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Chaucer and Religious Controversies in the Medieval and Early Modern Eras
Great Matter” to the “Stillingfleet Controversy” to the English Civil War and the Glorious Revolution, controversies to which I attend in the subsequent chapters of this book. Throughout the early modern period Catholic and Protestant partisans compete to define the English medieval past as their own and to reap the benefits of its legacies, a competition in which gendered rhetorics feature strongly. Protestant polemicists negatively feminize the Catholic past, and for them Chaucer is a masculine figure who underwrites an enlightened, proto-Protestant version of the English Middle Ages upon which they can build a case for Protestantism as the authentically English faith. Catholic polemicists, similarly, see Chaucer as a figure who can save the English Catholic past from feminization. As an orthodox Catholic poet, he legitimates Middle English as a language for devotional writing and illustrates that the Roman Catholic Church in the fourteenth century was, as it is for these Catholic writers in their early modern present, the true English church. Chaucer thus enables partisans in religiopolitical controversies to lay claim to the valuable yet volatile commodity of the past and to manage its fraught gendered dimensions. Religiously informed interpretations of Chaucer also authorize particular visions of what religious partisans think that their present is, or should be. Just as the Wife of Bath takes on a life of her own outside of her Prologue and Tale, so too Chaucer as a figure, and writings associated with him, take on lives of their own. We see the Wife of Bath escaping the confines of her Prologue and Tale within The Canterbury Tales, when the Clerk invokes her “and al hire secte” (IV 1170–71) at the end of his Tale and when the character Justinus in the Merchant’s Tale cites her as an authority on marriage (IV 685–86). We see something similar happening within English literary culture at large, when she becomes the subject of a ballad entitled “The Wanton Wife of Bath.” The ballad begins: IN BATH a WANTON WIFE did dwell, As CHAUCER he did write, Who did in Pleasure spend her Days In many a fond Delight.5
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The ballad recounts the Wife’s death and her soul’s dialogue with Adam, Jacob, Judith, Solomon, and various other biblical characters at heaven’s gate before she finally gains admittance (in some versions she goes to hell, where the devil will not admit her, before journeying to heaven). It places great emphasis not only on her sexual transgressions but also on her quick wit, her verbal acuity, and her ability to turn scriptural knowledge to her own ends to undermine traditional sources of authority, as she does in her Prologue.6 Note, for instance, the exchange that occurs when the Wife of Bath’s soul encounters David: King DAVID hearing of the same, Unto the Gate did go. Quoth DAVID who knocks there so loud? And causeth all this strife: You were more kind, good Sir, said she, Unto URIAHS Wife. Over the course of the early modern period, the figure of Chaucer and texts in the Chaucerian tradition become, like the Wife of Bath, not just textual artifacts but potent cultural signifiers available for appropriation and transformation. The Chaucer who created the loquacious Wife of Bath, or the translating Second Nun and the feisty St. Cecilia she presents in her Tale, might well not have recognized himself as the orthodoxly pious author William Forrest invokes in his History of Grisild the Second to legitimate the restrained model of queenship and female virtue he crafts for Queen Mary, but nonetheless Chaucer and his writings were available to be used in this way. Because Chaucer’s writings contain such a range of religious perspectives, from critiques of ecclesiastical corruption that gave him a reputation for being a Lollard sympathizer to unquestionably orthodox prayers to the Virgin Mary, his religious malleability makes him readily accessible to competing factions in religious controversies. Furthermore, his authority—literary, political, and spiritual alike — makes him a highly desirable resource for rival religious causes to mobilize. Precisely because Chaucer, and with him the medieval past he represents, are so malleable, however,
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Chaucer and Religious Controversies in the Medieval and Early Modern Eras
writers who invoke him have to work particularly hard to stabilize their religiously inflected representations. Much as, in the political sphere, Protestantism ultimately won the day as the English religion, so too a Protestant version of Chaucer largely dominated Chaucer reception from the sixteenth century through the eighteenth century. An understanding of Chaucer as a figure who had sympathies with the Lollard movement would significantly influence his early modern reception. The identification of Chaucer as a Lollard sympathizer or proto-Protestant was commonplace in the sixteenth century, and this understanding was, as James Simpson has observed, received as fact by 1570, when the second edition of John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments was published.7 In that text, Foxe says that Chaucer “saw in Religion as much almost, as even we do now, and vttereth in his workes no lesse, and semeth to bee a right Wicclevian, or els was never any.”8 Though the interpretation of Chaucer as a friend of the Lollards rested largely on the Plowman’s Tale (which was not written by Chaucer but which Thynne added to the 1542 edition of the Works), the figure of the Wife of Bath, like those of the ecclesiastical figures Chaucer satirizes (the Monk, the Friar, the Pardoner, the Prioress), also lent support to such an understanding of Chaucer’s religious allegiances. The dominant early modern Protestant reception of Chaucer is quite evident in a heavily annotated copy of The Workes of Geffray Chaucer Newly Printed, with Dyuers Workes Whiche Were Never in Print Before, held by the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas. The seventeenth-century reader who marked up this copy is clearly in sympathy with interpretation of Chaucer as a proto-Protestant, as a satirist of ecclesiastical corruption and proponent of religious reform. The annotations also, though, bear witness to the multilayered complexities of English religious cultures and Chaucer’s roles in them. The annotator of the Ransom Center copy of the Workes is particularly taken with the figures of the Friar, the Summoner, the Pardoner, and the Prioress. Beside the picture of the Summoner, this reader writes, “Chaucer no dowt saw the knauysh abuse of fryres in those dayes.” The reader further comments on the Summoner’s Prologue, which presents the memorable parody of the iconography of the Virgin’s Mantle in which friars swarm out from under the devil’s tail.
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The reader notes, “The ffrers are all lodged in dyuells ars by thowsand thowsande or millions”—something of an exaggeration, since the text actually indicates “Twenty thowsande freres on a route.” Furthermore, this reader adds beside the Summoner’s Prologue, “The dyuells ers the ffryers heritage.” Making her or his own religious allegiances abundantly clear, the reader labels the Prioress’s Tale “A leued superstitious papisticall fable.” The annotator additionally signals her or his view of how Chaucer would have responded to Tudor-era religious debate by attributing to Chaucer himself criticism of “popery” and prelacy. Next to the image of the Pardoner placed between the Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale, the annotator writes, “Chaucer in thys prologue (as in dyuerse other places) verray excellently describes the greate craft and abhominable disceyt of popysh prelates, vernyshed over with a fayre face and color of fayned religion and fals pretended holiness.” There is one more annotation by this reader that is even more interesting in relation to the reader’s imagining of an afterlife for Chaucer in English religious debates. Returning to the Summoner’s Prologue and Tale, we find in the right hand margin the following: “Yff Chaucer had beyn alyue perhaps this geare might have made hym tos a fagot in queane marys days.” With this annotation, the reader imagines a Chaucer whose proto-Protestantism would have been deemed heterodox under Queen Mary. The phrase “made hym tos a fagot” indicates that Chaucer’s depiction of religious figures would have been seen as crossing the orthodox line under Mary’s Catholic regime; Chaucer as a consequence would have been tried for heresy. Subsequently, he would “have carried his faggot . . . i.e. been absolved of heresy and borne a faggot as a symbol of that repentance.”9 Though relapsed heretics were executed by burning at the stake, publicly carrying a faggot was a frequent punishment after absolution following an earlier conviction.10 Even more fascinatingly, and further suggestive of the annotator’s projection of Chaucer not only into Mary’s day but into the religious ferment of his or her own seventeenth-century moment, is the annotator’s use of the word “geare.” According to the Oxford English Dictionary, one of the meanings current in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries for the term “gear” is “discourse, doctrine, talk; also in deprecatory sense, ‘stuff,’ nonsense.”11 As Mark Rankin points out, the word
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Chaucer and Religious Controversies in the Medieval and Early Modern Eras
“geare” is “typically used by polemicists who wish to position themselves against either an evangelical Protestant or Catholic position.” The term, he indicates, is used to signal a derogatory attitude toward an opponent’s position in a religious context.12 Indeed, St. Thomas More uses this term in precisely this way in his Dialogue concerning Heresies, as I discuss in chapter 3, and Rankin’s view accords with examples given to illustrate this meaning in the Oxford English Dictionary—for example, “1624 W. Bedel Copies Certaine Lett. vi. 101 No maruell if this geare could not passe the Presse at Rome.”13 So, it seems that the annotator is not only imagining that Catholic readers in Queen Mary’s day would have seen Chaucer as heretical but also positioning him- or herself on the side of Chaucer vis-à-vis a Catholic reader of his or her own time, who would derogatorily label Chaucer’s reform-minded depiction of corrupt ecclesiastical officials “geare.” In other words, the pro-Protestant annotator and the proto-Protestant Chaucer are aligned with each other against Marian Catholic persecutors of Protestants as well as against seventeenth-century Catholic sympathizers who would condemn the critiques of “popish” superstition and corruption that the reader interprets Chaucer to be making, critiques like the ones the reader her- or himself makes in the annotations. Though the pro-Protestant annotator of the Ransom Center copy of Chaucer’s Workes imagines Chaucer being judged heretical under Mary’s reign, there were Marian readers of Chaucer who received Chaucer positively. Indeed, as I demonstrate in chapter 3, it is in the Marian period that a version of Chaucer as an orthodox Catholic English poet, rather than a Lollard sympathizer, begins to emerge. The seventeenthcentury annotator also posits an oppositional relationship between himself/herself and a contemporary Catholic reader of Chaucer. Such an oppositional relationship between Catholic and Protestant interpretations of Chaucer characterizes the nature of Chaucer reception in the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, as I discuss in chapter 4. Indeed, in the literary sphere, as in the political one, the Catholic was never entirely erased or eliminated, and one important aim of this project is to examine the little-studied Catholic countertradition of Chaucer reception, a countertradition connected with alternative visions of the English nation, English history, and the English literary canon.
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The Ransom Center Library’s annotated copy of the Workes provides a fascinating illustration of the ways in which Chaucer and the Chaucerian tradition were enmeshed in early modern English religious controversies. This book looks both backward and forward from this early modern scene of reading to explore Chaucer’s roles in religious debates in his own period and afterward. The first chapter, entitled “Female Spirituality and Religious Controversy in The Canterbury Tales,” considers the prologues and tales told by Chaucer’s two female monastic pilgrims, the Second Nun and the Prioress. These characters, as well as their prologues and tales, suggest that Chaucer was engaged with contemporary female spirituality as a vibrant, contentious cultural force in which the innovative yet orthodox and the emergently heterodox blend, much as the orthodox and unorthodox merge in the Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale. These female monastic pilgrims and their prologues and tales reveal Chaucer’s awareness of and interest in the emergence of Lollardy— the greatest English religious controversy of his lifetime — as well as his cognizance of the burgeoning visionary, mystical, and prophetic spirituality of Continental holy women. In my reading of Chaucer’s nuns, I demonstrate in particular the strong affinities between their prologues and tales, on the one hand, and texts associated with St. Birgitta of Sweden, on the other. Significantly, there are important respects in which Brigittine spirituality converges with the emergent Lollard movement. Thus, I explore the Prioress and the Second Nun as exemplars of multivalent, ambiguous female spirituality. Their texts correspondingly engage a constellation of issues that are central both to English debates about Lollardy and to debates about the legitimacy of Continental women’s mystical, visionary, and prophetic experiences and writings. Central points of contention include the status of women’s speech, especially women’s religious and political speech; the legitimacy of women’s teaching and learning; and the nature of the relationship between Latin and the vernacular in the religious sphere. This chapter thus foregrounds a focus on Chaucer, gender, and instruction—a combination of topics already present in the early modern reception of the Wife of Bath as a source of didactic material and wise advice — that runs through subsequent chapters.
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Chaucer and Religious Controversies in the Medieval and Early Modern Eras
The second chapter is entitled “Chaucer, the Chaucerian Tradition, and Female Monastic Readers.” In this chapter, I shift my attention from the ways in which Chaucer represents nuns to the ways in which actual later medieval and early modern nuns used texts by Chaucer and in the Chaucerian tradition. Though little scholarly attention has been devoted to this topic, Chaucer’s works, as well as works by Hoccleve, Lydgate, and Bokenham in which they attend to the figure of and the literary legacy of Chaucer, were owned in the later medieval and early modern periods by such large and culturally influential English nunneries as Denney, Amesbury, and Syon. I focus in this chapter primarily on Syon and Amesbury, because the manuscripts found in these nunneries’ libraries comprise potentially surprising reading material for nuns; they include Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls, Lydgate’s Siege of Thebes, and Hoccleve’s Regiment of Princes. As I argue in chapter 1, Chaucer’s Second Nun represents a sophisticated engagement on Chaucer’s part with question of female religious authority, vernacular theology, and religopolitical reform. Amesbury and Syon in the later medieval and early modern periods were communities in which the learned, outspoken Second Nun would likely have felt right at home. The real-life sisters of these houses drew upon texts by Chaucer and in the Chaucerian tradition to develop rhetorical strategies and courses of action in complex political situations in which their communities were actively engaged, situations that included providing religious and political advice. Chapter 3 turns to the Tudor period, in which the proto-Protestant identity for Chaucer that would come to dominate Chaucer reception was consolidated. This chapter, called “Competing Chaucers: The Development of Religious Traditions of Reception,” first traces the early emergences of both a reform-minded Protestant Chaucer and an orthodox Catholic Chaucer in texts appearing in the late 1520s and early 1530s: Thynne’s Works (1532) and Thomas More’s Dialogue concerning Heresies (1529, second edition in 1531). In many respects, though, the Chaucer of both of these texts is a more moderate figure than the more polemically inflected iterations that would follow later in the sixteenth century and through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Chaucer of Thynne’s 1532 edition is not as strongly reform-minded as the reader of the annotated Ransom copy of the Workes suggests, and
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More’s Chaucer, at least through much of the Dialogue, is not the rigidly orthodox Catholic figure that he becomes for William Forrest in the mid-sixteenth century or for later seventeenth-century Catholic controversialists. Because the reception of proto-Protestant Chaucer was so dominant in the early modern period, and because it has been the subject of so much criticism, in the rest of chapter 3 I turn my attention to the development through the middle and later sixteenth century of the interpretation of Chaucer as an orthodox Catholic poet. Considering again in this chapter questions of gender, religion, and instruction, and focusing on the writings of William Forrest, particularly his History of Grisild the Second and the devotional poetry found in MS Harley 1703, I analyze the ways in which Forrest draws upon Chaucer to promote, in an era dominated by female monarchs, a model of queenship predicated on queens’ possessing limited political agency. Forrest’s rewriting of the Clerk’s Tale for exemplary ends instructs Mary to concern herself with traditional pursuits associated with medieval female spirituality, including affective piety, contemplation, and charitable good works. Forrest also associates Chaucer with forms of Marian piety quite different from those found in the Second Nun’s Prologue and the Prioress’s Prologue and Tale, linking the maintenance of traditional Marian devotion with the maintenance of the political good of the realm. Chapter 4 is called “‘Let Chaucer Also Look to Himself’: Gender, Religion, and the Politics of Canon Formation in Seventeenth-Century England.” In this chapter I continue to analyze the Catholic countertradition of the use and reception of Chaucer in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. This chapter brings together some prominent canonical writers who are today rarely considered together but who in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries did converge in exchanges among debating Catholic and Protestant factions: Chaucer, Julian of Norwich, and John Dryden. Both Chaucer and Julian of Norwich were reintroduced to seventeenth-century audiences by Catholic writers. Dryden published translations of several of the Canterbury tales in his Fables Ancient and Modern (first published in 1699), choosing to translate the tales since the Middle English of the sixteenth-century editions had become too difficult for many of his contemporary readers.
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Chaucer and Religious Controversies in the Medieval and Early Modern Eras
Serenus Cressy published Julian of Norwich’s revelations in 1670, a publication that sparked the polemical exchange known as the “Stillingfleet Controversy,” in which, as I discuss, Chaucer plays a key role. In my analysis of the texts published as part of this debate, I consider the modes of textual encounter theorized by early modern Catholic readers who engage with Chaucer and Julian; gender and religion here again dramatically interact in the realm of religious controversy, since these textual encounters are predicated on complex, and complexly gendered, imbrications of bodies and words. The Catholic literary and political histories that Cressy, Catholic polemicists, and Dryden shape through their involvement with medieval texts also depend on interlocking sets of generative and genealogical relations in which words cause bodies—and the religiopolitical histories associated with those bodies—to have presence and be present in their contemporary world of a Protestant England. The final chapter is called “‘Flying from the Depravities of Europe, to the American Strand’: Chaucer and the Chaucerian Tradition in Early America.” This chapter focuses on three colonial American writers who had personal and textual connections to each other: Cotton Mather, Anne Bradstreet, and Nathaniel Ward. For all of these writers, the figure of Chaucer, Chaucer’s works, and works in the Chaucerian tradition feature significantly in their involvements in and negotiations of religious and political conflict in both Old and New England in the midseventeenth century. Though it might be surprising, especially in relation to the staunch Puritan Cotton Mather, the Wife of Bath proves to be an important figure for all three writers, as once again gender and religion intersect in framing the terms of religious debate and political instruction. Mather, Bradstreet, and Ward engage with Chaucer and the Chaucerian tradition to negotiate relationships of past and present, old and new, as they establish positions of textual, political, and spiritual authority. For these writers, Chaucer and texts associated with him inform their processes of shaping distinctively colonial religiopolitical visions and developing modes of New English identity vis-à-vis Old England. As these colonial writers work to advance their faith and achieve political as well as cultural transformations grounded in their faith, Chaucer and the Chaucerian tradition ensure the reformed legitimacy of the reli-
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gion practiced in the churches of New England as well as the English authenticity of reformed Protestant religion. Throughout this book, I adopt a transnational and transperiod approach, situating Chaucer and the Chaucerian tradition in an international environment of religious controversy spanning four centuries. My aim is to present an innovative, nuanced analysis of the high-stakes religiopolitical struggle inherent in the creation of the English literary canon, a struggle that overlaps with efforts to establish religious and national identities on both sides of the Atlantic. In these controversies, Chaucer proves to be much more than the “Father of English Poetry� that Dryden so famously dubs him.14 He also appears in the guises of a sacerdotal, priestly father; a source of sentential wisdom; a quasi-saint; and a figure who legitimates political dynasties.